Oh, I forgot to mention that a TRUE New York pizza is 18", not 16" But of course, that usually can't be helped for us home oven people.

Say, one other point that just occurred to me when Foccaciaman mentioned the digital scale in his previous post. I wonder now, when pizzerias make their own dough, how closely they measure their ingredients? I somehow can't picture the guys at Lombardi's using a scale to precisely measure their ingredients. Does that mean that the precision we're striving for here is unnecessary in terms of making consistent dough? I know there's issues of scale--it's not as important to be a little off when measuring out professional quantities, in contrast to when we're making two dough balls at home. But I'm wondering just how much the precision is necessary even for our purposes.

In the Lehmann dough recipes, I have been using either table salt or a fine sea salt which I compared on my digital scale on a volume to volume basis and found to weigh about the same. I have Kosher salt on hand, but I only tend to use it when a recipe calls for it. I also have some fancy coarse sea salt on hand but I haven't tried using it in dough recipes because of its large particle size (which may be good as a condiment at the table but not for doughs) and because I don't have an easy way to determine how much to use as a substitute for other salts. If I did use if for doughs, I would first grind it to a considerably smaller particle size.

When recipes (including the Lehmann dough recipe) call for salt by weight, for example, in ounces, I have been using the weight-to-volume conversion data that Steve and others posted in the past, based on their having weighed cup-sized amounts of ingredients used in dough recipes in small quantities not easily measured on most home scales. I have used similar conversion data for yeast (ADY), sugar and olive oil. I came up with similar conversion data for IDY recently (1 cup IDY = 5.10 oz. and 1 t. IDY = 0.10625 oz.) In most cases, you will end up with oddball volume measurements and have to round up or down to the nearest size measuring spoon you have--destroying all the calculations you made to get precise and accurate measurements .

As for your comments about people using Kosher salt in recipes in lieu of table salt, you may be interested in knowing that some salt producers, such as Morton's, suggest using the two salts interchangeably on a volume for volume basis. For example, when I looked at the box of Morton's coarse Kosher salt, I saw a Usage Tip, which says: "As a general rule you can also use MORTON Coarse Kosher Salt in your favorite recipes as you would MORTON Table Salt and MORTON Canning and Pickling Salt....teaspoon for teaspoon or cup for cup". I don't personally follow that tip; instead, I do the math to calculate the conversion amounts going from regular salt to Kosher or vice versa. (To convert regular salt in a recipe to Kosher salt, I use 1 1/2 to 2 times as much Kosher salt as table salt, by volume.)

I think that one of the reasons I mentioned the salt issue was that I remember reading something (PR's American Pie I think) about using a larger amount of salt if using Kosher. I could have sworn that it was almost double the amount of table salt. This amount seem a little extreme to say the least. However it is easy to see that Mortons Kosher and Table salts could not possibly have the same weight at the same volume.

Whether this actually makes a considerable difference in the actual cooking I am sure Mortons has surely tested. But to say that they are interchangable in terms of recipes makes me truly wonder how much a difference the amount of salt may play in the recipe other than taste.

A while back, in connection with my experimentation with Tom L.'s NY style recipe, I did some research at the PMQ site on what is a typical size and dough weight for a NY style pizza. I found 16-18 inches to be quite typical and a dough ball weight of anything from 20-24 ounces, which is why I settled on 16 inches and 20-21 ounces for most of the Lehmann experiments. When I was looking into buying pizza screens, I thought of getting an 18-inch screen but discovered that it wouldn't fit within my oven with the door closed. I could have gotten a 17-inch screen, but that seemed such an odd size. In any event, I have found that I can almost make it to 17 inches on my 16-inch screen by letting the dough hang over the edge ot the 16-inch screen a bit. Once the pizza hits the hot oven, the dough starts to firm up pretty quickly. I guess that's as close as I will be able to come to the size of a TRUE New York style pizza--unless, of course, I invent an "accordian" pizza

As for your question about industry practices, I am not an expert in that area and can only report on what I have read. But I suspect that if you went into the baking rooms of many pizzerias, and especially the mom and pop places, you would find just about every imaginable dough management practice under the sun. Some would use baker's percents and weigh everything, and some will use volumetric measurement for just about everything but the flour, which they perhaps assume weighs what the bag says it does. But even a 50-pound bag of flour doesn't necessarily weigh exactly 50 pounds. At the mills, the bags are filled so quickly with sifted flour that the actual flour weight of a 50-pound bag can vary as much as 6-8 ounces either way. Professionals learn how to adjust for the weight discrepancies (for example, you could weigh the filled bag and subtract the known weight of the empty bag, to get a net weight). There will also be some occasional flour loss, as when a 50-pound bag is put into a 60-quart Hobart and some of the flour is tossed out of the mixer during the initial mixing (which can be minimized by not introducing the entire bag of flour into the mixer all at once). From what I have read, the best practice for professionals is to weigh everything, using "bench scales" that can weigh ingredients of up to 60-100 pounds, and other scales that can be used to weigh lighter weight ingredients such as yeast, salt and sugar. Getting the right weights of everything, and especially yeast, seems to be a crucial step in achieving sound dough management.

Even at the prep table, it is important to scale the dough to get uniform ball sizes and weights. Otherwise, the results will be unpredictable, in an environment where reproducibility of results is crucial. And the weight management practice extends to the preparation of the pizzas from the dough balls themselves. To be successful and make a profit, it seems to me that you had better learn how to use portion control for everything from the tomato sauce, the cheese and all the other toppings. A heavy hand, and especially for costly toppings like cheeses, could cost you your profit.

Steve once said in a posting: "My biggest peeve is unreproducible results. I am a stickler for exact measurements and procedures." I feel exactly the same way. To me, percentages are percentages and it shouldn't really matter whether you are talking about 50 pounds of flour or one pound of flour or 10 ounces of yeast or 0.20 ounces of yeast. Otherwise, you are just guessing about amounts and their relative proportions. Then our recipes become just like the ones we always complain about. I do admit that it gets a little bit dicey when you are measuring minute quantities of things like yeast, salt, oil and sugar, and, as indicated in my last posting, the accuracy and precision can be thrown out the window when you try to get the right size measuring spoon to use, but that's the best available to us under the circumstances unless you have a very expensive scale that can measure minute quantities of things. Even then, Tom L. says that a breeze can come along and throw off your readings. We just do the best we can

In view of the many variations possible using Tom Lehmann's NY style dough recipe, I thought it might be useful to explain to readers how to design their own Tom Lehmann NY style pizzas. By "design", I mean to determine what weight of dough ball you will need to produce a Tom Lehmann NY style pizza of any desired size and thickness and to determine how much of each ingredient you will need to produce that particular weight of dough. The benefit of doing this is to produce only what you will need for the pizza you want, and not finding yourself with leftover dough or having miscalculated and produced less dough than what you really needed or wanted.

Assume, for example, that you would like to make a 14-inch New York style, thin-crust dough based on Tom L.'s recipe, and that you have elected to use a 62% hydration percentage (roughly in the middle of the range recited in the recipe) and instant yeast at the high end of the range recited in the recipe.

The first thing you will need to do is to calculate the weight of dough ball you will need to produce the 14-inch, thin, pizza. This is done using this expression, which has appeared many times at this site:

W = Pi (i.e., 3.14) x R x R x TF,

where R is the radius of the pizza (in our example, 14/2 = 7 inches) and TF is the thickness factor, having a value of 0.10 for a thin pizza. So, for the 14-inch pizza, you will need 3.14 x 7 x 7 x 0.10, or 15.386 ounces of dough. If you would prefer a thicker pizza, or because you deem a New York style pizza to be a "medium" thickness pizza rather than thin, that is not a problem. You would just use 0.11 or something approximating that as the thickness factor. I chose 0.10 for my example because Tom L. himself, in the recipe, characterizes the NY style pizza as being "thin". (All of the thickness factors I reference come from PMQ.)

The next step is to determine how much of each dough ingredient you will need to produce the dough ball weighing 15.386 ounces (don't worry about the several places after the decimal point, since we will round out later). To do this, you will need the baker's percents. In our case, Tom L. has made the task easy for us by providing the specific baker's percents for his recipe. They are as follows:

Using the above baker's percents, we can now start to calculate the weights of ingredients we will need for our 15.386 ounce dough ball, beginning with the flour. To do this, all that is necessary is to add up all the percentages for all of the ingredients--including the specific hydration percentage we have chosen in our example, 62%, and the specific percentage of IDY we have chosen, 0.25% (the upper limit of the IDY range). So, this summation yields: 100% (flour) + 62% (the selected hydration percentage) + 1.75% (salt) + 1.0% (oil) + 0.25% (the selected amount of IDY), or 165. We then divide this number by 100 (to simply the calculations) and divide the result, that is, 1.65. into the dough ball weight, 15.386 ounces, we calculated above. This gives us about 9.33 ounces (15.386/1.65) as the weight of flour we will need for the 15.386 ounce dough ball. This can be rounded out to 9.35 ounces.

To calculate the weights of the remaining ingredients for our hypothetical recipe, we use the 9.35 ounce number and multiply it by the individual percentages for the remaining ingredients. This is where the % key on the calculator comes in handy, although if you are careful with your entries, you don't need to have or use the % key. Multiplying 9.35 by the individual percentages yields--with appropriate rounding--the following recipe amounts:

Note that if you add up all the weights as noted above, the total will come to about 15.4 oz., or just about equal to the weight we calculated using the above expression (it will be exact if the weights are carried out to several decimal places.) This is a good cross check on the math, to be sure that you haven't made any errors. It's easy enough to do when you are working out to several decimal places (and I hope I haven't made any such errors here in this post ).

For those with decent scales, the flour and water usually pose no problem to weigh. However, for the salt, oil and yeast, which would require an expensive scale to weigh because of their very small quantities, it is easier in a home setting to use conversion data to convert from weight to volume. Steve and others at this forum have developed this conversion data previously for salt, oil and ADY (and other dough ingredients), by weighing cup-sized quantities and converting to teaspoons, and I recently did the same for IDY. This is basically the last step in the process of finalizing your recipe for the dough ball you "designed". These are the conversion factors you will need (I have also included the conversion factor for sugar which, as indicated in previous posts in this thread, is optional in Tom L.'s recipe):

To use the above conversion data, all that is necessary is to divide the weight of the salt, oil and IDY in the above recipe by the respective weights listed in the conversion table. So, for example, to convert the 0.16 ounces of salt in the recipe for our hypothetical dough ball to a volume measurement, divide 0.16 by 0.196875, which comes to roughly 0.80 t., or slightly more than 3/4 t. Doing this for all the ingredients gives us the final recipe:

And, that's it . With a little practice, the above exercise will become second nature and make you wish that all recipes were stated in baker's percents. And it will bring the scientist out in you. Build it and they will come .

Note that Tom L.'s recipe can be modified in any way desired to produce any size or thickness of dough with any desired hydration percentage (within the specified range) and with any type of yeast (within the respective specified ranges). It will be necessary, of course, to add up all the percentages, as described above, to arrive at the number that will be used as the divisor to divide into the calculated dough ball weight. Since ADY is preferred by some bakers, I have included the conversion data (weight to volume) in the above conversion table. As a final example--just to show how easy it is to make changes to Tom L.'s recipe to suit individual circumstances--if one wanted to make a dough ball with a hydration percentage of 60% and use ADY at 0.30%, the summation would be 100% (flour) + 60% (water) + 1.75% (salt) + 1.0% (oil) + 0.30% (ADY) = 163.05. Dividing this number by 100 gives us 1.6305, and the amount of flour needed in this example would be 15.386/1.6305, or 9.44 ounces, or roughly 9.45 ounces. The weights of the rest of the ingredients would be determined in the same manner as described above. (Note: When using ADY, I usually proof in about 1 T. of warm water, leaving the rest of the water available for temperature adjustment in order to achieve a finished dough temperature of about 80 degrees F. I subtract the 1 T. of water from the total.)

I hope that this "tutorial", which can be used for any dough recipe specified in baker's percents, helps those who care to become pizza "designers" .

Today I made another pizza based on Tom L.'s New York style dough recipe, but with three major departures from my prior experiments with the recipe. Before getting to the changes, I will first mention that I "designed" the dough to produce a 14-inch pizza. The ingredients and percentages for making the dough were exactly as I detailed in the example I gave in the previous post. For recapitulation purposes, the recipe I followed was as follows:

The first departure I made from my prior efforts was to use the Giusto High Performer flour, a high-protein flour with about 14% protein + or - 0.05% (according to the spec sheet). I had intended to use the KA Sir Lancelot flour but the decision to use the Giusto flour was made for me when I discovered that I had just about run out of the KASL.

The second departure from my prior efforts was to use an autolyse. Technically, an autolyse is a period of rest for a dough that is made by combining flour, water and yeast (if the rest period is short)--and no salt. The salt is left out because it is hygroscopic (it absorbs water) and interferes with the process of hydration (absorption of water) by the starch and gluten in the flour and also impairs action of the yeast, as is well known. The net effect is that during the autolyse the dough has a chance to recover from the stress of the initial kneading, making the dough easier to handle and shape and resulting in a more porous interior. It also cuts down on the mixing times and, consequently, minimizes oxidation of the dough, which has the effect of mixing out color and flavor (according to Peter Reinhart, it destroys vitamins such as beta carotene.) The use of autolyse is an old baker's trick and is not as common with pizza dough as it is with bread dough, but I have used it many times before, and I note that others on this forum, including Giotto, have also used it before or a variation of it. (Peter Reinhart also uses a variation in his NY style pizza dough recipe.)

The third departure was to use a food processor for all the mixing and kneading, using a 14-cup Cuisinart processor fitted with a plastic blade. One of the problems with kneading a small amount of dough in a stand mixer is that it is difficult to get the mixer to do a thorough job of kneading without stopping the machine from time to time to reorient the dough relative to the paddle or dough hook or to do some hand kneading to expedite the kneading process. The food processor does not have this problem. However, the food processor has the problem of contributing considerably more frictional heat to the dough than a stand mixer--as much as 30 degrees F as compared with about 3-5 degrees F for a home stand mixer operated at low to medium speed. In my case, this meant having to use cold water to compensate for the fricitional heat of the food processor to achieve a finished dough temperature of aroung 80-85 degrees F as called for in Tom L.'s recipe. Based on the temperatures that prevailed at my place today, this meant having to use a water temperature of 46 degrees F.

To prepare the dough in the food processor, I first combined the flour and IDY in the bowl of the processor. Using the pulse feature, I then added the water to the bowl of the processor and pulsed the machine until all of the flour had been taken up by the dough. I then covered the bowl for 10 minutes, as an autolyse. After the 10 minutes had passed, I examined the dough and took its temperature. The dough was very soft and malleable and had a temperature of about 78 degrees F. I then added the oil and kneaded that into the dough, again using the pulse feature. This was followed by adding the salt and pulsing that into the dough also. This was followed by running the machine at full speed ("on") for about 20 seconds. Although I didn't perform a windowpane test, the dough was smooth and silky with no tears on the outer skin. The finished dough temperature was 83 degrees F. So, as you can see, it doesn't take much to run up the dough temperature in a food processor, even when the plastic blade is used. It takes far less than a minute. But, so long as you can minimize buildup of heat in the dough, as by using the pulse feature as much as possible, you will get a dough that is as good as, if not better, than what you will get in a stand mixer for the same amount of dough.

Once the dough was prepared, I lightly coated it with olive oil, put it into a metal cookie tin with the cover on loosely (in order to allow the dough to dry out a bit), and placed the tin in the refrigeraror. An hour later, I removed the dough from the tin (its temperature had dropped from 83 degrees F to 64 degrees F by this time), placed the dough within a plastic bread bag and returned it to the cookie tin. I tightly secured the cover to the tin, and placed the tin back into the refrigerator. Exactly 24 hours later, I removed the dough from the refrigerator (the dough was at a temperature of 56 degrees F), and brought it out to room temperature in preparation for shaping, dressing and baking. About 1 1/2 hours later, I started to shape the dough. It was softer and less dense than the dough I have been making with the KASL flour, but it was equally extensible and handled easily. I shaped it into a 14-inch round on a peel, dressed it, and baked it for about 7 minutes on a pizza stone that had been preheated for 1 hour at 500-550 degrees F.

Having tired of pepperoni pizzas, I dressed today's pizza with a mixture of 6-in-1 and San Marzano tomatoes, sliced mushrooms sauteed in butter, pre-cooked sweet Italian sausage (removed from its casing), sweet diced red peppers, shredded Fontina cheese, provolone cheese, fresh oregano, dried sage, a small amount of fresh rosemary, and olive oil. The crust of the finished pizza was properly browned and exemplary of the classical NY style pizza. It was softer, however, than the crusts made using the KASL and lacking an autolyse. Whether the differences were attributable to the autolyse or the different flour will have to await another day when I have had a chance to repeat the recipe again with the KASL flour I normally use. But I couldn't complain about today's pizza. With a glass of red wine, it hit the spot. The photo below, and in the next post, depict today's pizza.

It might come as a surprise to you to know that I hardly ever watch Alton Brown, although I did see the segment on pizza . Most of what I have said on this thread is vintage Tom Lehmann--I hope . But thanks anyway.

There's no doubt that your approach works, and is likely to lead to more innovation than a more scientific approach--as evidenced by your successful deep-dish dough recipe. I recall when I was trying to adapt your recipe (with dough weighing 36 ounces) to my dinky pans that when I did the math to figure out what I would need, I concluded that your dough recipe used around 19 percent oil. That was considerably higher than any deep-dish dough recipe I could ever recall, and figured that I had made a math error in arriving at the 19 percent figure. I could recall 8 or 9 percent for deep dish, but not 19 percent. When I re-did the math, I saw that I hadn't made an error. However, I was happy that I was able to figure out how much dough to use for my situation. Otherwise, I might have passed on trying your recipe altogether, or waited for a time to make a pizza using the full 36 ounces of dough or getting a big enough deep-dish pan to use the full amount of dough. I'm glad I went ahead with downsizing your recipe, since I enjoyed the pizza very much.

In a similar vein, I recently bought some dark, heavy-duty 9"x2" deep baking pans at a very good price to use for deep-dish pizza purposes. The first thing I did when I got home was to take the baker's percents for your deep-dish dough recipe and calculate how much dough I would need to make your recipe in the new pans.

With Tom L.'s NY style dough recipe, I have been trying to stay reasonably close to the recipe with the objective of trying to show others how to adapt the recipe to their particular circumstances and needs, just as I did when I scaled down your deep-dish recipe for my own use. If I am lucky, I might get someone to try Tom's recipe who otherwise wouldn't have because of the commercial nature of the recipe or because they are mystified by baker's percents. The math is a manipulation tool only. It doesn't show you how to be innovative or creative.

TF is just a number. The expression (3.14 x R x R) gives the square inches of the pizza surface, and TF takes care of the thickness. Somewhere along the way, most likely through trial and error or experimentation, someone decided that a thin pizza should have a TF of 0.10. The TF for a medium thickness pizza is 0.11, and for a thick pizza it is 0.12. I found these values at the PMQ site, in articles by Tom L. and Big Dave.

I will be out for most of the day, but I will show you in another post how you can work backwards from a pizza size you like to get the TF factor that might work better for you.

When I did the math to figure out what I would need, I concluded that your dough recipe used around 19 percent oil. That was considerably higher than any deep-dish dough recipe I could ever recall, and figured that I had made a math error in arriving at the 19 percent figure. I could recall 8 or 9 percent for deep dish, but not 19 percent .

A couple of people have made that comment which I find strange, because my recipe is a blend and adjustment of two others both with around 20% fat.

As I mentioned previously, the equation W = Pi (i.e., 3.14) x R x R x TF can be used to calculate the dough weight for a desired size (diameter) and thickness of pizza. The same equation can also be used--with a simple manipulation--for dough scaling purposes based on actual experience. Assume, for example, that you determined through the process of experimentation or trial and error that the ideal, or "perfect" dough ball weight (from your perspective) for a 14-inch pizza is 16 ounces. Using the expression (3.14 x R x R), where R is equal to 7, the surface area of the pizza would be calculated to be 153.86 square inches (3.14 x 7 x 7). A value for the thickness factor TF based on the 14-inch size pizza would then be calculated by dividing 16 by 153.86, or 0.1039906. That would become your "personal" TF number. (Mathematically, TF = W/(3.14 x R x R)).

That same TF could then be used for other size pizzas for scaling purposes, using the expression for W given above. For example, to determine the dough ball weight for another size pizza, say, 12 inches, the corresponding value of the new dough ball weight would be calculated by multiplying the surface area of the 12-inch pizza, or 113.04 square inches (3.14 x 6 x 6), by 0.1039906 (your personal TF), or about 11.8 ounces. To scale up to a larger size pizza, say, 16 inches, the amount of dough required would be calculated by multiplying the surface area of the 16-inch pizza, or 200.96 square inches (3.14 x 8 x8), by 0.1039906, or about 20.9 ounces. The dough ball weight for any other size pizza, up or down in diameter, would be calculated in the same manner. So, as you can see, you do not have to lock yourself into one of the three TF numbers I mentioned as being typical for the three different thicknesses--thin, medium, and thick. Of course, to determine your own TF means having to weigh the dough balls you make and then finding what weight works best for you in terms of producing the "perfect" crust thickness relative to the size (diameter) of the pizzas you make.

I thought I would devote this posting today to address more fully the subject of autolyse in the context of making pizzas and pizza dough. As reported in an earlier posting in this thread, I introduced an autolyse to Tom L.'s NY style pizza dough recipe as one of my several experiments with the recipe. Autolyse (pronounced "otto-lease") is a fancy term for a simple concept--a period of rest for a dough as part of the overall process of forming and kneading a dough. Its origins are principally in bread making (mainly artisanal breads) rather than the making of dough for pizzas. In fact, I first became aware of the use and benefits of autolyse from making artisanal sourdough breads in accordance with the teachings of Nancy Silverton in her book "Breads from La Brea Bakery".

In the strictest technical sense, autolyse is a period of rest for a dough made from mixing flour and water, and usually yeast--but not salt. Sometimes the term has been used for doughs incorporating other ingredients also--such as sugar, oil and/or salt. The term is even used on occasion--I suspect somewhat incorrectly--to describe the period of rest to which a dough is sometimes subjected to allow the gluten to relax more fully because the dough is overly elastic (with springback) and difficult to shape. Over time, the term autolyse has come to be used to describe almost any period of rest to which a dough is subjected.

The notion of using autolyse for bread making developed a following, especially among artisanal bread makers, because the autolyse allowed the starch and gluten in a dough to better absorb water (hydrate), it allowed gluten developed in the dough to relax more fully and provide greater softness in the dough, it reduced oxidation of the flour and thereby preserved color and flavor contributing vitamins (such as carotenoids), it reduced the overall kneading time, and resulted in a soft, more open crumb in the crust. Leaving the salt out of the dough during the autolyse minimized the potentially harmful effects of salt on the yeast (if incorporated into the dough) and thereby allowed somewhat greater volume expansion of the dough.

In looking at pizza dough recipes at this forum and elsewhere, I saw that autolyse, in pretty much all its forms and variations, has been incorporated in one fashion or another into many of the recipes I saw for making pizza doughs. As previously mentioned, even Peter Reinhart, whose original work with doughs came out of bread making more so than pizza dough making, is also an advocate of using rest periods in the course of making pizza doughs (including for his NY style pizza dough in his book "American Pie").

All of this begs the question of whether there is a legitimate role for autolyse or other forms of rest periods in pizza dough making. To be sure, the concept of autolyse does not appear to be generally endorsed by the commercial pizza industry. In fact, when I did a search of the term "autolyse" at the PMQ forum, I came up with exactly 0 hits. Combining that term with "pizza" or "pizza dough" at Google, got me 33 hits and 9 hits, respectively, and many of those were not directly on point and none was in the context of practices employed by the commercial pizza industry. Tom L. himself has on many occasions stated that bread making is not the same as pizza making. All of this leads me to believe that the general pizza industry does not see sufficient value to using autolyse in their practices, or the use of autolyse has gone generally unreported, or the current practices followed by pizza professionals do not lend themselves well to incorporating autolyse into their processes, even if the perceived benefits of autolyse are understood and appreciated. In a home environment, introducing rest periods is easy to do. For a stand mixer or a food processor, all that is necessary is to stop the machine for several minutes (5-20 minutes is typical) during the process of kneading and let the dough rest. It may be a little bit more difficult to program rest periods (autolyse or otherwise) into a bread making machine, but it can be done. Autolyse and other forms of rest periods can also be introduced into a hand-kneaded dough.

None of this is to suggest that everyone immediately incorporate autolyse into their pizza dough recipes. My experience with autolyse is that it does produce a somewhat surprisingly soft and malleable dough and contributes to a more open and porous crumb, and for those who like that characteristic in a crust, whether for a NY style pizza or any other style pizza, incorporating an autolyse or other rest period(s) into the dough making process may be a useful tool for the home pizza maker. As with any tool, the user will have to do some experimenting to determine its potential value.

Peter

« Last Edit: May 15, 2005, 04:22:41 PM by Pete-zza »

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pete: this is perhaps a dumb question, but when incorporating autolyse into your dough making, do you knead for, say ~5 minutes, and then let it rest awhile, and then throw the salt in and knead it a little more? the reason i ask is because i could see myself doing this in such a way that the salt doesn't get evenly mixed into the rest of the dough.-scott

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after i graduated i went to live with my grandparents for awhile, and i wasn't able to make pizzas there. after escaping that place i then spent a bunch of time studying for the law school admissions test. however, now i'm back home, done studying, and ready to make some pizza. -scott

It's not a dumb question at all. The most effective way of doing an autolyse (whether it is 5 minutes or something else) seems to be the way you suggested. The autolyse is usually used at the beginning of the kneading process, after you have combined the flour and water (and, often, the yeast) and before adding the salt. The concern you voice about incorporating the salt into an already-kneaded dough is a legitimate one. In fact, you will note that once salt is added to a dough that has been subjected to a fair amount of kneading, the dough is very likely to tighten, develop tears, and become more difficult to knead and stretch. It's actually quite interesting to observe this phenomenon since it demonstrates how dough and salt aren't naturally compatible. Anyone who has ever made bread dough by hand following this procedure will be intimately familiar with the difficulty of incorporating salt into an already-kneaded dough.

However, once the salt has been completely worked into the dough, whether by machine (which will be faster) or by hand, the gluten in the dough become stronger, and the dough is thus capable of stretching farther without ripping. At this stage, the salt will improve the texture and the elasticity of the dough, increase the dough's capacity to retain gasses (air and carbon dioxide) and, consequently, expand the volume of the dough. It's just the short while when the salt is being worked uniformly into the dough that you will note how antagonistic the dough is to the salt. In some respects, it is like trying to incorporate oil into an already-kneaded dough, which is a practice recommended by Tom L. (as opposed to mixing the oil in with the water, etc.) It takes a minute or two for the oil and the already-kneaded dough to come together to form a smooth ball.

Thus far, I have tended to use autolyse where I want a soft and open crumb, as with certain Neapolitan style crusts based on 00 flour or equivalent flour combinations. With the NY style, I tend to prefer the thin, chewy, leathery crust, but once in a while I will use the autolyse even for the NY style just as a change of pace. I notice that Peter Reinhart uses rest periods in all his dough recipes in American Pie.